From a critical perspective situated in Latin America and the Global South, science must be conceived and defended as a public and common good in the face of commodification, epistemological and technological dependence, and structural asymmetries that have historically limited the production, circulation, and social appropriation of knowledge. Although international discourse often presents science as a universal resource, its access and dissemination remain conditioned by commercial infrastructures dominated by the Global North, which generates epistemological dependence and limits the visibility of local research agendas.

In this approach, consolidating science as a public good implies decommodifying its communication processes, protecting open and non-commercial infrastructures, and strengthening regional models based on collaboration and free access to read and publish. The Latin American case is identified as evidence that it is possible to sustain scientific communication systems managed by public institutions and oriented toward the public interest.

Furthermore, it is noted that the expansion of pay-to-publish business models deepens existing gaps and compromises the public nature of knowledge. From this perspective, ensuring that science functions as a public good is understood as a political and collective task that requires defending open infrastructures, reducing commercial pressures, and ensuring equitable conditions for the generation, evaluation, and dissemination of knowledge.

Furthermore, it is crucial to critically analyze initiatives and infrastructures that declare themselves "neutral" regarding pay-per-publish (APC) models. Such neutrality tends to reproduce the conditions that allow the expansion of commercial schemes that exacerbate existing inequalities, especially for scientific communities with fewer resources. Recognizing the effects of these positions means understanding that the absence of a stance against inequitable dynamics ultimately reinforces the patterns that sustain them.

Similarly, it is crucial to influence decision-makers to recognize the strategic value of non-commercial open access, explicitly integrate it into scientific evaluation systems, and allocate resources for its maintenance. The continuity of these infrastructures depends on public and university policies that value their contribution to equity, information sovereignty, and the collective construction of knowledge.

This situated perspective of open science in Latin America and the Caribbean demands the incorporation of other essential components such as open infrastructures, research data, scientific evaluation statements and guidelines, citizen science, open education, and open dialogue with other knowledge systems. None of these elements is neutral: all are permeated by global power relations that determine who sets the standards, who controls the data, which infrastructures are considered legitimate, and which practices are recognized as valid. In the region, dependence on commercial platforms, the imposition of external metrics, the scarcity of resources for managing open data, and the devaluation of community knowledge demonstrate that openness only has emancipatory meaning when it is built from our own frameworks, with public technologies, local languages, and regional epistemological priorities. Therefore, a truly Latin American open science must strengthen sovereign infrastructures, develop data and metadata geared toward local needs, promote responsible evaluation systems that respond to cognitive justice, and consolidate open education models that engage with collective knowledge and the social agendas of our territories. Only in this way does openness cease to be a peripheral adaptation to external norms and become a political tool to contest meanings, democratize knowledge and expand scientific capabilities from and for our communities.

From this perspective, ensuring that science is considered a public good requires political and collective action. This implies a transformation at several levels: it is necessary to critically evaluate current models of scientific communication, mitigate commercial pressures, modify funding frameworks, strengthen public infrastructure, foster collaborative models at the regional level, and, fundamentally, ensure equitable conditions in the generation, evaluation, dissemination, and social appropriation of knowledge.

The relevance of the Working Group (WG) lies in the need to articulate critical theory, public and institutional policy, and collective action to guide the development of open science toward a more just, sustainable, and socially relevant model. This rationale is organized around four main dimensions.

(1) THEORETICAL RELEVANCE: Open science is not just a set of technological practices; it implies an epistemological stance. From a Latin American perspective, its theoretical foundations are linked to debates on cognitive justice, decolonization of knowledge, epistemic plurality, and the democratization of knowledge production processes.

The dominant model of scientific communication (based on subscriptions, publishing fees, rankings, commercial metrics, and editorial concentration) is not neutral. It conditions and defines who has the right to publish, which languages ​​circulate, which topics are legitimized, and which knowledge is marginalized. The contributions of CLACSO, FOLEC, and the Bogotá Manifesto (2025) underscore that transforming this system requires redefining the evaluation and funding criteria that perpetuate these inequalities.

At this point, the GT faces the challenge of articulating critical theory and empirical evidence to challenge meanings and propose alternative horizons.

(2) SOCIAL RELEVANCE: In the regional context, open science is key to strengthening democracies and promoting more equitable societies. It is not just about providing free access to scientific articles: it is about recognizing society as part of the knowledge production ecosystem.

That's why the GT incorporates essential topics such as:

Citizen and participatory science represents a paradigm shift in how research is conceived and conducted. This approach is based on active collaboration between scientists, researchers, and the general public, but especially by including other social actors and their knowledge systems (such as the knowledge of ancestral peoples, farmers, workers, or folk wisdom) throughout all stages of the research cycle. This model promotes the democratization of knowledge, strengthens the link between science and society, and facilitates the generation of more effective and context-specific solutions to complex problems.

- Open infrastructures for data management (research data or public data, produced and held by government or social interest entities) that guarantee the transparency, reuse, and traceability of knowledge produced with public resources. Strengthening open infrastructures is not only a technical matter, but also a science and social policy strategy aimed at democratizing access to knowledge, accelerating innovation, and strengthening trust in science and public institutions.

- Evaluation of research, fair, inclusive and contextualized; promoted by FOLEC, in alliance with different spaces for the production of open, diverse, situated and non-commercial indicators and supported by various regional declarations that introduce criteria of social impact, relevance and collaboration.

These approaches are essential for strengthening public trust in science and broadening social participation. In this way, socially relevant science is fostered, strengthening our democracies and our society.

(3) INTELLECTUAL RELEVANCE: Non-commercial open access (internationally known as Diamond Open Access) is one of the Working Group's central pillars. While this model has a long history in Latin America—publishing openly without charging readers or authors—it has recently begun to gain traction in Europe as well. The European Union Council's Conclusions on Scholarly Publishing (2023) express concern about the rising costs of subscriptions and APCs for publishing, and warn that the system has become unsustainable for funders and public institutions. Therefore, the Council urges Member States and the European Commission to fund non-profit publishing infrastructures, led by public organizations, and to reform evaluation systems in cooperation with global partners.

This convergence opens an opportunity for interregional collaboration that recognizes Latin America's trajectory, widely valued as the region of the world that has made the most progress in non-commercial models of science communication. Based on this, for the period 2026–2028, the Working Group will focus on promoting Latin American and Caribbean open science as a common good, critically analyzing global initiatives, strengthening South-South and South-North alliances, and fostering partnerships that benefit the region.

The Working Group considers it essential to debate the current European "diamond" proposal, which outsources processes to non-profit providers. This practice, while formally non-commercial, reintroduces market logic and raises doubts about its fiscal and social legitimacy. This trend could lead to covert commercialization, creating tension with the Latin American model, which is publicly funded and managed by academic institutions.

Regional positioning should build on its historical strengths—non-commercial open access, bibliodiversity, multilingualism, and regional cooperation—and address key challenges: infrastructure sustainability, cooperative financing, and evaluation reforms that incentivize non-commercial practices. This requires consolidating a vision of non-commercial open access as a global public good, aligned with the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation (2021), the Manifesto on Science as a Global Public Good: Non-Commercial Open Access (2023), and the SDGs.

The Working Group will critically analyze: The European "diamond" proposal, which outsources processes to external providers; the risks of covert commercialization that contradicts the logic of the common good; and the implications for regions with less infrastructure, where an outsourced "diamond" model can exacerbate inequalities. At the same time, the region possesses distinctive strengths—bibliodiversity, multilingualism, and cooperative networks—that should be highlighted as contributions to the global debate.

(4) STRATEGIC RELEVANCE: To consolidate science as a public good, sustainability models consistent with this vision are needed. In this regard, the Working Group needs to analyze, discuss, evaluate, and disseminate community funding models, where tasks and costs are shared, collaborative networks are used, and these models do not depend solely on institutional budgets but also involve national and regional consortia and networks. It is also necessary to encourage specific government support for the Diamond model (open access publications that do not charge for publishing, and repositories that also do not charge for open access publishing) and to seek collaboration with multilateral organizations and other regions that share this vision.

The Working Group will study and promote: Cooperative financing (consortia, national and regional networks). Sovereign infrastructures in free software, academic governance, and community participation. Scientific evaluation reforms that align incentives with open science. South-South and South-North partnerships with approaches aligned with the perspective of this Working Group.

These elements are essential for open science practices to be sustainable, scalable, and resilient in the face of global commodification processes.

In conclusion, our region possesses a voice, experience, and model that are crucial today for guiding the global course of open science. Our main objective is to go beyond mere participation in the global debate, but rather to shape it from a situated, critical, and affirmative perspective of the Global South.